30 THE president's ADDEE8S. 



Three scholars resolved on reciting daily the Psalter, each 

 taking a third ; and they agreed among themselves that in the 

 event of one dying, the others should take his Psalms on them 

 in addition to their own. First one died, then the other two 

 readily divided his fifty Psalms between them. But presently a 

 second died, and the third found himself saddled with the daily 

 recitation of the entire Psalter. He was highly incensed against 

 heaven for letting the other two o& so easily, and overloading 

 him with obligations. Then, in his resentment, regarding God 

 as having treated him unjustly, we are informed that he fasted 

 against Him.* 



In India the fakirs possess power over the people who flock 

 to them to entreat the gods to obtain for them abundant 

 harvests, or the burning of an enemy's house, the ^^eeovery of a 

 sick child, or the wholesale destruction of an enemy's family. A 

 man who sits on spikes, has voluntarily distorted himself, or who 

 lives half buried in the earth, is supposed to be all powerful 

 with the gods. Why so ? Because through his self-tortures he 

 has wrung a legal power over the gods to grant what he shall 

 ask. The very same race which underlies the Hindu population 

 of India underlay the Celtic Gael in Ireland and the Brython in 

 Britain. That race which to this day sets up menhirs and dol- 

 mens there, strewed Ireland and Cornwall with them at a 

 remotely early period. That same race has scattered these 

 remains over Moab. We find the same legal and religious 

 ideas in India and in Ireland ; as also in Moab, which is 

 likewise strewn with dolmens. Balaam comports himself just 

 as would a Christian saint many centuries later in Erin, because 

 these ideas belong to the non- Aryan Ivernian race everywhere. 

 Monachism among the Celts, doubtless, received an impulse from 

 such books as the " Historia Lausiaca " of Palladius, and the 

 Life of St. Martin, by Sulpicius Severus ; but it did not origi- 

 nate from the perusal of these books. It had existed as a 

 system from a remote antiquity among the pagan forefathers 

 of the saints. 



Everything conduced to engage the Christian missionaries 

 in a contest of ascetic emulation with the medicine men of 



*" Book of Lismore," Anecd. Oxon, p. 8. Also in the " Book of Leinster," 

 p. 233. 



